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Turkey: Kurdish mayor decries ‘hypocrisy
on language’
23.7.2012 |
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Diyarbakir’s Sur Municipality hangs a sign on a
Mardin Highway. The sign reads ‘Welcome to our city’
in Turkish, Kurdish and Syriac. There are 74 ongoing
prosecutions against the Sur Mayor, most of them for
multi-lingual municipal services. DHA photo
Abdullah Demirbas, The mayor of Sur Municipality in
Diyarbakir
July 23, 2012
DIYARBAKIR, The Kurdish region of Turkey,
— Diyarbakir’s Sur Municipality mayor says the
government’s attitude over multi-lingual public
services is hypocritical. ‘When the Prime Minister
speaks Kurdish on TRT 6 they call it a revolutionary
development. But when we put multi-lingual
signboards around the city our move is considered a
crime,’ he says
The mayor of Sur Municipality in Diyarbakir, who
recently faced investigation for putting up
multi-lingual signboards, has decried what he calls
the government’s “hypocritical attitude” toward the
use of Kurdish in public services.
“We face a very strange situation. When the prime
minister [Recep Tayyip Erdoğan] speaks Kurdish on
TRT 6 [the state-owned channel that broadcasts in
Kurdish] they call it a revolutionary development.
But when we put multi-lingual signboards around the
city our move was considered as a crime.
Interestingly, some acts that are legal for the
government are illegal for us,” Sur Mayor Abdullah
Demirbaş said in a recent interview with the
Hürriyet Daily News in Diyarbakir.
Maintaining his efforts to establish a multi-lingual
municipality service since taking office in 2004,
Demirbaş has faced dozens of investigations on the
grounds that he breached the equality principle of
the constitution. He was dismissed from his post by
a Council of State ruling in 2007 over his attempts
to provide municipality services in Kurdish,
Assyrian and English languages in addition to
Turkish, charged with committing abuse of office. A
Diyarbakır court later acquitted the multi-lingual
services of Sur municipality.
After being re-elected in 2009, Demirtaş remained
under detention for five months, for alleged links
with Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK). He was
released due to health problems in 2010.
Speaking to the Daily News at his multi-lingual Sur
municipality building, Demirbaş said they had
conducted a survey in the Sur district, which
confirmed that 72 percent in the area spoke Kurdish,
24 percent Turkish, 4 percent Arabic and 3 percent
Armenian, Syriac or Zazaki.
“We did not offer multi-lingual services for Kurds.
I offer services both in my mother tongue and
another language that our people speak. So when we
launched Kurdish language courses, we did the same
for Armenian and Syriac,” he said.
No matter if it is a crime
Demirbaş said there were 74 ongoing prosecutions
against him, most of them for multi-lingual
municipal services, and that 486 years in total
prison sentences were being sought as part of those
probes.
“Language is a very basic right of a human-being. If
a legitimate right is not assured legally, we have
to fulfill it no matter whether it is a crime or
not,” Demirbaş said.
Commenting on the ongoing probe into the KCK, which
is the alleged urban wing of the outlawed Kurdistan
Workers’ Party (PKK),www.ekurd.net
Demirbaş said the operations had led Kurds to give
up hopes for an eventual positive outcome to the
democratic struggle for a resolution to the Kurdish
issue.
“There was a [tacit] message of the KCK operations:
‘If you oppose the government, you will be jailed.’
Since the beginning of these operations, over 2,000
people have gone to the mountains [to join the PKK],
and one of them is my son,” Demirbaş said, referring
to his son who joined the PKK in 2009 when he was 16
years old.
Demirbaş said he was emotionally shaken that one of
his own sons was a PKK militant and that another one
is soon to join the Turkish army for his compulsory
military service.
“Who can desire peace as much as me? I’m talking as
a father. My heart is separated into three: one
piece is with those in prison, one with those in the
mountains and another one with the soldiers. I can
understand the feelings of a father whose son is
soldier. I, as a father whose son is in the
mountains, feel the same. We are both waiting for
our sons to return home,” Demirbaş said.
By Hüseyin Hayatsever - Hurriyet Daily News
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